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11 August 2012

When did "neurologists" appear?

Neurologist vs. Psychiatrist

Notice that the year 1920 is significant for the history of psychiatry and neurology. (From Google Ngrams Viewer here.) These data represent a category challenge for historians of psychiatry, neurology, internal medicine, and psychology. It would be very useful if historians would begin to explain the significance of this chart. I would like, for example, an historian to analyze sociologist Andrew Abbott's study of jurisdiction disputes between neurology and the clergy in the nineteenth century in light of these meta statistics. One doesn't have to dispute the relevance and importance of Abbott's larger theory to also note that neurology is simply not the textbook case we thought it was.